Broadcasts: one message to many people
The school’s loudspeaker: parents, learners, teachers and staff, by email, WhatsApp, push or in the app.
A broadcast is a message you write once and hand over to a chosen audience. It is how a school announces a closure, reminds four hundred families that fees are due on Friday, tells every parent of Sixth Year A that the first-term results are ready, or reaches the whole staff at six in the morning without a single phone call.
Three people normally use this screen. The secretary sends the routine reminders. The head of school sends the announcements that must be read. The administrator keeps an eye on whether they actually arrived — and that last part is what makes the screen worth learning properly, because a message you never checked is not a message you sent.
Each broadcast is written in both languages, sent over one or more channels, and addressed to an audience you choose from roles, classes and enrolments. The list beside it keeps the running totals — how many recipients it had, how many went out, how many failed — so you can tell at a glance whether the September fee reminder actually reached the families.
Send a broadcast in five steps
The click path from the menu to a message on a parent’s phone.
-
Step 1
Open Messaging > Broadcasts
The list shows every message you have sent with its type, targets, status, recipients, sent and failed counts.
-
Step 2
Write it, in both languages
Click New Broadcast. Fill the Title and the Body for English, then the French ones — the two versions travel side by side, and each reader sees only their own. You can also attach an Image and a Link To.
-
Step 3
Choose how it travels
Set the Delivery Type: Email, WhatsApp, Push Notification, In-App, All Channels, or Selected Channels — and if you choose the last one, tick which channels to use.
-
Step 4
Choose who hears it
In Send To, pick All Users, Teachers, Students, Parents, Levels or Learner Groups. For Levels and Learner Groups, tick the specific ones so a fee reminder goes to Sixth Year A and not to the whole school.
-
Step 5
Send now, or schedule it
Leave Send immediately on and the message goes out as soon as you save. Turn it off and set a Schedule time instead — for the fee reminder at seven in the morning, not at midnight on Sunday when you were building it.
Choosing the audience
The most common mistake in this menu is a broadcast that is too wide — and it is always correctable only before you send.
Roles: teachers, students, parents, everyone
All Users, Teachers, Students and Parents address people by what they are. These are the right choices for a staff meeting, a general notice to the whole school community, or a fee reminder that genuinely concerns every family. Each recipient is counted once per channel, so a parent who is both a guardian and a staff member is not messaged twice for the same broadcast.
Levels and learner groups: the targeted choice
Levels and Learner Groups are how you narrow the audience to the people who actually need the message — the parents of one class, the students of one cohort. Tick several and you get a union of them, which is what you want when a closure affects Sixth Year A and Sixth Year B but nobody else. This is the setting that makes the September fee reminder land on the right four hundred families.
Who counts as a recipient
A recipient is someone who can actually be reached: an enrolled learner, a registered parent or guardian, or a staff member with an address on file. Learners without a parent on record are reached through their own portal rather than by a message to the family, so a missing guardian phone number shows up as a lower recipient count rather than as a failure.
Choose one channel or several
All Channels is generous and expensive in time and money. Email is the one families actually read when it matters. WhatsApp is read within minutes in most schools and is the right channel for anything urgent. Push Notification reaches learners and parents who have the app open on a phone, and In-App puts the message inside the portal itself, where it cannot be missed but is also only seen by people who log in.
Send now, schedule, or cancel
What the status column is telling you while the message is on its way.
Sending is queued, not instant
Saving a broadcast puts it in Queued, then Preparing, then Sending, and finally Completed when every delivery has been processed. A large broadcast to four hundred parents does not finish before you close the window: come back in a few minutes and read the sent and failed counts.
Scheduling a message for tomorrow morning
Turn off Send immediately and set a Schedule time in the future. The broadcast stays in Queued with your chosen time beside it, and goes out on its own — which is how you tell four hundred parents at seven in the morning that fees are due, instead of at midnight on Sunday when you were actually writing it. A schedule time in the past is refused, and the screen says so rather than sending silently.
Cancelling a broadcast you regret
Use Cancel on the row of a broadcast that has not finished. It stops going out and the status becomes Cancelled. This is a genuine safety net for the message sent to the wrong audience — but it only protects the recipients who had not yet been reached, so check the sent count before you celebrate.
Editing and deleting
A broadcast that has not gone out can be edited, which is the right repair for a typo in a fee reminder: fix the body, save, and it sends the corrected version. A broadcast that has already been completed can be deleted from the list, but its delivery history is kept — because knowing what went out, and to whom, is precisely the record you need when a parent says they never received it.
The rest of the Messaging menu
Write once, reuse, and check — the three screens around this one.
-
Reuse
Message templates
Save the texts you send every year — fee reminders, results, reopenings — so they are written once, not ten times.
-
Verify
Delivery history
The per-recipient record of who was handed each message, when, and what failed.
Broadcast questions
Asked after the first time a message did not arrive.
-
How do I send a message only to the parents of one class?
In the Send To field choose Learner Groups, or Levels if your school works by level, then tick only the class you mean. The recipients count in the list updates before you send, so you can see the size of the audience you are about to address. Parents of other classes are not counted and are not messaged.
-
I sent the fee reminder to the whole school by mistake. Can I stop it?
Press Cancel on the row as fast as you can. The broadcast stops and its status becomes Cancelled, so the recipients not yet reached receive nothing. Messages already handed over cannot be recalled, which is why the cancelled row still shows how many had gone out — read that number, and follow up with the people who did not get it.
-
When should I use WhatsApp instead of email?
WhatsApp for anything a family must act on within a day: a closure tomorrow, a change of collection time, a fee deadline. It is read within minutes and needs no new app. Email is better for long messages, for anything a parent may need to keep, and for staff who read their inbox rather than their phone. Sending on several channels at once is normal for a genuinely urgent announcement.
-
Can I schedule the reminder for seven in the morning?
Yes, and it is worth the extra click. Turn Send immediately off and set the Schedule time. The broadcast waits in the queue and goes out by itself at that hour, which means the message lands when a parent is awake rather than when you happened to be writing. A time in the past is refused, so check the date as well as the hour.